Posted
by
timothyon Thursday July 26, 2012 @04:02PM
from the like-amazon-apis-but-open-source dept.

krow writes "HP Cloud is offering free access to Open Stack via its public cloud. Adoption of the Open Stack APIs is growing, and we [note: 'krow' is also known as Brian Aker, once Slashdot's 'database thug,' later the creator of the Drizzle database, and now an HP Fellow] are offering up access to push tool integration and adoption around the APIs. Most recently we have been able to add support for on-demand Jenkins orchestration via the JCloud's plugin. API as well as console access is being made to the computer, object storage, and CDN interfaces. There are images being provided for different Linux distributions, and additionally images for Bitnami, ActiveState's Stackato, and Enterprise DB's Postgres images."

Amazon has a free account forever, until you out grow it. This one is "up to" three months, or until you outgrow it. In most cases, the proof of concept takes longer than three months to prove and fund. That means with Amazon you can try something without having to get major approvals, and just show a working prototype. With HP, it is a gamble.

And then there's RedHat's OpenShift [redhat.com] that appears to be free forever as long as you don't need much power. I guess that might change if it gets real popular, but then real popular should mean they have a lot of paying customers to subsidise the freebie option.

Usually, slashvertisements attempt to sneak by as industry news, cloaked in a veil of third-party language and trying to pretend to be mostly about new developments in the industry and less about "sign up for our service now".

I suppose there's a sense in which this more overt slashvertisement is an improvement (in that it doesn't pretend to be something its not). I just hope Slashdot is getting paid more for this than it would be for a regular ad (since there's no option for established users to hide this k

I hope that Slashdot aren't getting paid for that, because if it truly is an advert, it's one of the crummiest adverts I've ever seen.

I mean, I'm pretty up on 'cloud' stuff. I use EC2 extensively. I'm up on Java, I write quite a bit of that stuff. I recognise many of the buzzwords in the post but I don't have the slightest clue what they're talking about or what exactly HP are offering. And I don't care enough about this gap in my knowledge to click any of the links and find out, because I suspect it'll be

Appfog is also offering free accounts, with 2 gig of RAM to use as long as you want. This seems like a great way to build your app and get it started, then once you grow you can fund the required expansion. Very startup friendly.

This is the free as in milk tactic in hopes to get IT departments hooked on HP services. Cloud services are awesome if you are into IT-BDSM. Because you are slipping your privates into a noose someone else controls. First visit is free, you like it, then you start to need it, then you are trapped. This is another form of vendor lock-in.

Well played HP. Or should I say Madam HP?

If you want cloud services, then build it yourself using the exact thing HP is using for free. Openstack.